Steal formats from Magic: The Gathering

Unknown

So this came up in this thread.
http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19029

What if, instead of having a huge balancing act involving every single character and having to nerf the top dog for the sake of diversity, we had formats?

So "Standard" would use all the 1*s, a certain amount of 2*s, and a certain amount of the newer 3*s.
"Classic" would be the current format, where every character goes.

This way, people without maxed older characters would still be able to compete, and who knows, maybe we find out what a top10 looks like without all xforce-sentry-hoods.

I mean at the rate you guys are releasing characters, don't you get bummed that they're all ignored in pvp?

Just a thought.

Unknown

I'd think the 'standard' set should be all 1*, all 2*, and some uncontroversial 3* like say, Psylocke. A character like Sentry should never be in the standard set. The standard set can change, but shouldn't be often (MTG changes once an year, which sounds about right here too).

Then you can have each season that features a rotating list of 3* and 1 or 2 4*. Event format could be:

Everything
Standard + last 3 seasons
current season character only

Now the problem might be you'd end up with too many events, but if they're not tied to a season ranking I don't see what's the harm to have 4 PvP events going at once.

If there's no plan to balance characters like Sentry then the 'everything' format should be more for just bragging rights, just like Vintage isn't part of the world ranking for MTG I think (hard to imagine a format where you've cards that are no longer in print could have a high weight because that'd be unbelievably P2W). Maybe make it like Elite tournaments where you only have a few of those events but do give out big prizes when they happen.

Zen808

Been thinking about this a lot, and it would actually make for an interesting experiment:

Run "Standard" and "Everything" event at the same time; same prizes, you can only enter one.

We would assume that transition teams will most likely choose "Standard" set, because their underlevelled teams would fare better. The question is, what would the veterans do? Would they play "Everything," even knowing they'd have to work harder for the same prizes, just because they're so used to using their A+ team? Or would they play "Standard" with the understanding that competition will be lighter, but they can't Sentry-bomb and they might be more vulnerable to actual retaliation from the transition teams?

I for one am curious.